When entering the world of online poker, it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement of real-time poker against real-life players.

As a relative beginner, you can get drawn into betting big and playing hardball against players that have far more experience of poker online.

Because of this, it’s all the more important to remember to ease yourself in to the online game. You can’t see your opponents, so even if you have a good nose for smelling a bluff or an eye for reading body language, these skills aren’t going to come in handy compared to real-life poker.

One good way to ensure that you don’t get carried away is to play against fellow beginners (although be wary of this as you can get some poker sharks simply pretending to be new to the game.)

A more effective method of keeping your feet on the ground is to play ‘limit’ poker. This is the more cautious brother of no-limit hold ‘em and true to the name, there is a limit on the bets you can lay down.

Limit poker is played with fixed bets. In a 5 – 10c game of limit poker, the first two rounds (preflop and flop) all bets and raises are made in 5c increments. In the next two rounds (the turn card and the river card), bets and raises are made in 10c increments.

Playing this form of poker helps to ensure that you don’t get caught up in the moment – and even if you do, you’re not going to lose the amount of money you could playing no-limit poker.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 1:57 pm and is filed under Online Poker, Poker Basics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.